About 20 minutes after their win over lowly Tamworth in the FA Cup third round, Tottenham manager Ange Postecoglou was moving through his postmatch interviews. He said he was pleased with his side and that he was ready to get on the team bus to head home. But as he spoke, a small band of Tamworth supporters in his eyeline chanted: "We want our replay!"
Tamworth had held Tottenham -- a team five rungs up the ladder from their National League base -- scoreless over 90 minutes, but lost 3-0 in extra-time. Previously the 0-0 would have been enough to secure a lucrative replay at Spurs' home ground, but in this new format of the FA Cup they had to play another 30 minutes and possibly endure a penalty shootout to progress. In the end, their legs gave out. Tottenham brought on £70 million worth of stars (Son Heung-Min, Dejan Kulusevski, Djed Spence) and that was that. The Tamworth players were proud, but there was also this niggling feeling that they'd been robbed of the opportunity of a lifetime.
"It's just a shame there's no replays: that's what we're gutted about," said left-back/salesman Callum Cockerill-Mollett. Afterwards, the players referenced the missed replay -- and a trip to Tottenham -- more than their golden chance to win the game in the seventh minute of added time.
"I think it obviously would have been a massive amount of money," Tamworth manager Andy Peaks said. "It's annoying because we've got enough free Tuesdays to add a replay, but I guess it seems like the big boys haven't got any more dates."
This year, the FA Cup has become an obvious victim of football's ever-increasing largesse and gluttony. Those in European competitions say they have too many matches, with Maheta Molango, CEO of the Professional Footballers' Association (PFA), telling ESPN in August the "fixture calendar is broken to the point that it has now become unworkable." And it's the FA Cup that has had a slice taken out of it: the iconic replay, a lucrative reward for those smaller teams that held on to draw against a big club, is now a thing of the past.
On one hand, you could argue this makes sense: reducing fixture burden is a help, but FA Cup reductions are hard to fathom against the backdrop of an expanded, 36-team, eight-matchday Champions League and a 32-team Club World Championship this summer. To offset the loss, the FA increased the prize money in the early stages, but it's not a life-changing amount for lower-league clubs as the replay often was.
According to a source, the absence of a third-round replay at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium cost Tamworth around £850,000: receipts from tickets/concessions are split between the two clubs, and there would have been extra broadcast income from TV partners.
An unexpected FA Cup run can change a club's prospects or, in some cases, preserve its very existence. The money Marine FC earned from reaching the third round and hosting Tottenham in 2021 -- £800,000 -- saw them undergo a complete refurbishment. "We still pinch ourselves, to be quite honest, just how much it has changed the club," chairman Paul Leary said in 2023.
Exeter City believe their 2005 FA Cup jaunt, which included a third-round replay against Manchester United, helped save the club from extinction.
"The importance of FA Cup replays for smaller clubs can be the difference between their very existence or not, today or in the future," Nick Hawler, chair of the club board at Exeter, told ESPN. "Our replay against Manchester United set Exeter City on a course to a sustainable future."
Cambridge United took Manchester United to a fourth-round replay in 2015, the run earning them £1.5m. Chairman Dave Doggett called it a "game changer," even though his first thoughts of where to invest it had nothing to do with his squad, saying: "It's fair to say our toilets are quite bad so we certainly should be able to provide everyone with better ones now."
National League South teams Boreham Wood and Maidstone United have recently reaped the benefits of fairytale FA Cup runs, with both referencing Lincoln City as an example of what's possible. Back in the 2016-17 campaign, Lincoln became the first non-league side to reach the quarterfinals of the competition, where they ran into Arsene Wenger's Arsenal at the Emirates. They earned £1.3m from the journey -- which ended in a 5-0 defeat to the Gunners -- and built a new elite performance centre.
"The key with the money we got from the FA Cup wasn't to just throw it back into the playing budget and splurge it in one go," manager Danny Cowley said in 2018. "We've got to make sure we build an infrastructure that allows us sustained success." They're now in League One.
Boreham Wood reached the FA Cup third round in 2021 and 2023, but made a run to the fifth round in 2022 where they lost 2-0 away at Everton. Though they were relegated into the National League South at the end of last season, the money generated from the FA Cup helped keep the club afloat under chairman Danny Hunter. When COVID-19 hit, Boreham Wood were one of three clubs in the National League to continue paying their players their wages rather than putting them on furlough.
"I genuinely feel when we reached the fifth round, that was the football Gods repaying [Hunter]," Boreham Wood manager Luke Garrard tells ESPN. "We're continually growing, but I just feel the cup run helped us with our infrastructure and allowed us to be two or three seasons ahead of schedule."
The same goes for Maidstone. They were 2023-24's Cinderella story in reaching the fifth round, knocking out Ipswich Town at Portman Road along the way. The run brought £400,000 to the club, a source confirmed, which was spent on a new 3G pitch, upgraded their catering, a TV gantry and -- like Cambridge -- a new toilet block.
"They use the money to be sustainable and I think that's important," Maidstone assistant manager Craig Fagan tells ESPN. "We don't want to ever get the club in a situation where they can't continue to do what they've been doing for years."
However, with such a run comes the spotlight. "It has its downfalls because everybody wants to beat you because of how well you've done against Ipswich, how well you've done against the other league clubs," Fagan says. "We have a little bit of a target on our back, but they deserve that. We're coming up to the anniversary and we reckon it took its toll on the players in terms of them being mentally exhausted. Without those cup games, we might have had more of a chance of being automatically promoted, but you know, you'd never say no to a cup run."
Maidstone sit third in the National League South, England's sixth professional tier, and while the playing budget and spine of the team has remained the same as last season, Fagan believes the run to the fifth round gave the club added momentum.
"I would never look down on the FA Cup run," he says. "The things that the FA Cup, provides for especially people at our level is unbelievable. People were and still are talking about Maidstone, United. Before the FA Cup run, not many people would've even spoken about the club. It's been transformative."
Before this year's third round, Postecoglou, Manchester United's Ruben Amorim and Manchester City's Pep Guardiola all spoke affectionately about the FA Cup as if it was a dearly loved relative. But for big clubs, the cup is about function over romance: it offers them another trophy for the cabinet, a route into Europe. Lower down the pyramid, it offers a chance for transformation. The replays can create a rare opportunity to consider growth, and owners a moment to feel it's all been worthwhile.
"We've been robbed of that," Hawler says. "Consider also the impact on supporters, the loss of that moment of glory they'll talk about for decades to come. The loss of replays damage of heritage and our futures."
The legends of Tamworth, Maidstone and Boreham Wood are a timely reminder of how the world's oldest cup competition is about more than the trophy.
"A lot is being changed and being manipulated in football and it just feels like, leave the FA Cup alone, let it be what it is and has been," Garrard says. "It is a magical cup, the best cup in the world, and it gives us a chance."